Exploitation auteur Doris Wishman (1912–2002) has long been a favorite director of the artist Peggy Ahwesh. Indeed, it was to Wishman that Ahwesh dedicated The Color of Love (1994), her classic experiment in degradation—material and otherwise—by way of found pornography. This special Modern Mondays, presented in collaboration with Light Industry as part of MoMA’s annual festival To Save and Project, features AGFA (American Genre Film Archive)’s new digital preservation of Nude on the Moon (1961), an early Doris Wishman romp about a tropical society of topless aliens on the moon. “The films,” Ahwesh wrote of Wishman’s grindhouse enterprise, “offer the prerequisite weirdness of the genre but they have a seedy underlying resonance of the fear of and hostility toward women in our world, which Doris describes in her own profound and tawdry way.” Copies of Light Industry’s latest publication, a reissue of Ahwesh’s 1995 zine The Films of Doris Wishman, will be available at the event. Program approx. 120 min.
The Color of Love. 1994. USA. Written and directed by Peggy Ahwesh. 10 min.
Archival 16mm print courtesy the filmmaker
Nude on the Moon. 1961. USA. Written and directed by Doris Wishman. 70 min.
Digital preservation courtesy AGFA